Hermeneutics and nursing theory

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To have time for someone is to bring him or her into the sphere of one’s own existence, i.e., the being-in-the-world of one’s Dasein. The result is the formation of a Mitdasein between one and the person that one has time for. How is that time opens up an entry into one’s space? Does this show a primordial relation between time and space, what Heidegger elaborates as time-space (Zeit-Raum) in his secret writings from the 1930s, Contributions to Philosophy (not published until 1989, which is 13 years after his death)?

In contrast, not to have time for someone is to exclude him or her from the being-in-the-world of one’s Dasein – in order to prevent the formation of a Mitdasein with that person.

The classical Chinese concept of tianxia – under heaven – implies dominion of the Chinese imperial order (the emperor as tianzi, the “son of heaven”) and cultural sphere. In this ethnocentric view of the world, those people who live outside the Chinese dominion are considered “barbarians”.

Clearly tianxia is too narrow a concept to describe the whole world, even if is meant to convey the sense of the whole of the “civilised” world. Yet in Chinese culture, another common concept also has an expansive spatial meaning without the cultural and political constrictions of tianxia, namely sihai – the “four seas”.

How is it that aesthetic appeal on the existential level, in the form of drama, can work with so many people that it transcends gender, cultural and geographical boundaries? To quote American actor and singer Mandy Patinkin, “If [the artists] hit a nerve of universal simplicity, in all of us, in all different countries, that’s the magic moment” (Idato, 2018).

“The magic moment”: we are reminded of Heidegger’s attuned understanding of the temporality of time as Augenblick, the moment – when there is aletheia, the laying bare of the truth of being in full unconcealment.

Self, or the phenomenon of ipseity, constitutes our consciousness, such that consciousness is in fact understood and experienced as self-consciousness. (Mysticism has a more expansive understanding of consciousness, however, which transcends the determination of historical time.)

It is commonly understood that when one’s experience of self is seriously problematised, mental illness occurs.

This is based on a non-mystical understanding of self, not only by society but by the mental health consumers or patients themselves.

The overall construct of mental illness is based upon an exoteric, not esoteric, interpretation and understanding of consciousness. (Esotericism is built on mystical insights.) This construct is a form of hermeneutics stalled in the phenomenon of what Heidegger calls the “everyday”, which determines a form of Dasein known as das Man – the everyday people.

Mental illness is a profound experience of coming up against a wall built unquestioningly by the everyday people in their everyday activity.

In one aspect, the occurrence of mental illness signifies the oppressive power of das Man in how ipseity is to be experienced and understood. Hence the abyss which opens up in normality, feared and rejected by society as “madness”, actually provides an opening for a deeper experience and understanding of ipseity.

In a recent published study in neuroscience (Mehl et al, 2017) which has its central ideas popularised in the media (Moss, 2017), it throws up some very interesting philosophical questions for the hermeneutically attuned. Via the methodology of so-called conserved transcriptional response to adversity (CTRA), it is shown that we can deceive both ourselves and others in our spoken words when we are in adverse social conditions, such as chronic stress, making self-reporting quite unreliable as a methodology. Instead of self-reporting, what the researcher looks for are genetic expressions which in some cases bypass consciousness or self-awareness and state the true state the body of the person under investigation, such as post-traumatic stress. In the study cited, genetic expressions are apparently innocuous everyday words which are used repeatedly by the person, such as “so”, “really” and “very” (Moss, 2017). On the surface, CTRA appears to pose a serious challenge to philosophical hermeneutics, because when two people are supposedly engaged in an existentially revealing dialogue, the Dasein of the self-deceiver or deliberate deceiver becomes opaque and even concealed, making it difficult for the Gadamer’s model of fusion of horizons (leading to mutual understanding and growth) to do its beneficent work. Or should the hermeneutician not give up hope in interpretative horizoning and instead go looking for these genetic expressions like what neuroscience investigators do, but use them in a more holistic way which remains true to the ontological integrity of Dasein? And yet, in the search for and capturing of these linguistic biomarkers as natural language of the affect unmediated by self-consciousness, is there any danger that hermeneutics will be compromised by scientistic unreflection? Or can social genomics, which Mehl et al subscribe to, benefit from the traditional adherence to personhood in philosophical hermeneutics? Is not the sense that one is no longer a complete person the leading cause for mental breakdown for someone caught up in adverse social conditions? Is not the reduction of a person to a random, uncontrollable series of genetic expressions the very picture of madness that a therapist wants to free a distressed patient from?

Rachel Moss, Saying these words a lot could be a sign you’re stressed, HuffingtonPost, 10 November 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/saying-these-words-a-lot-could-be-a-sign-that-youre-stressed_uk_5a0570fae4b0e37d2f36e4a8.

The meme of the future that is already shaping the present is the giving over of Dasein to techne, in the global appropriation of being under the technological framework of Gestell, which in essence is Dasein‘s comportment to techne that in the fallenness of das Man (the anonymous everyday person) evades or deflects reflection on the meaning of being. In the absence of reflection, Gestell appropriates the meaning of being and vulgarises the ontological difference between being (Sein) and beings (Seiende) in the form of technological thinking alone.

Gestell, while framing the future, is manifest as an overarching power already framing the future possibilities of Dasein in the present. In fact the ontological space of Dasein is already becoming permeable to the entry of the otherness of the machine designed to emulate Dasein, if not to surpass it, by way of “thought”. The very arche (ἀρχή) of Dasein is thrown into question as a matter (Sache) of another beginning – a foreboding of vanishing as far as the essence of Dasein is concerned.

As the interface between Dasein and machine is predicted to become more and more seamless and even unified one day, what holds sway will be the battle of machination (Machenschaft) involving the two. This goes beyond the question of control, and is something that deeply affects the totality of being in essential thinking and experiencing.

With the future technology of neural lacing (àla Elon Musk) on the horizon, which aims to blur the distinctions among human consciousness, technology and the physical world in the name of seamless control – “Zum welchenZweck?”, one may ask -, spatialisation, as the temporalisation of space, will have the technologically augmented embodiment of Dasein as both its starting point and its endpoint. In that case, the possibility of primordial experience of being-in-the-world will necessarily involve breaking out of both the net and the grid of “intelligent” technology as the group mind of the post-human future.